My record collection on shuffle - daily from 2005 to 2011

03 June 2011

Trembling Bells: Abandoned Love

Continuing yesterday's riff about new music acquired, sampled and then put out to pasture, I see that I downloaded Abandoned Love on 27 April 2010, listened to it quite intently (between four and six listens) but then haven't played most of the tracks since 14 May last year.

I was really looking forward to this album, following Trembling Bells' Carbeth debut, but my lukewarm listening pattern reflects the mixed feelings I had about it. The sound has moved on. That's a good thing. I miss the old days when bands put out a new album every year and every one had a stylistic shift, not just a reiteration of brand values. Well done, Trembling Bells, for bringing back that ethic and aesthetic. I also loved it when I went to see them play on the tour that was ostensibly supporting this album, and they played hardly anything from it. Instead they played a whole bunch of newer songs (now released on another album, title, which followed twelve months after Abandoned Love) that they'd been writing since the recording of the "new" album. Bravo! Keep moving on. The album's under 36 minutes long, but that's fine if it's all fresh and rich material.

The downside is that Abandoned Love's subtle shift towards country rock, a fairly disciplined genre, moved the sound further away from the unhinged, feral passages that I loved with Directing Hand and missed with Carbeth. I'm not yet convinced by Alex Neilson's lyrics, and the re-imagined Yorkshire-in-the-Catskills that they paint (the vinyl LP has a Yorkshire white rose on the label on one side, a Lancashire red rose on the other — a concern that Neilson shares with Phil Oakey). And the word "priapic" fits in some songs, but for some reason doesn't sound right in a Trembling Bells one.

Yes, I got a vinyl copy of this album as well as the download (and, yes, that means I paid for the album twice). The artwork for Carbeth was so good, I fancied seeing something similar at 12" square. But as dictated by Sod's Law there's no booklet, inner sleeve or other insert with this album.